Dan Snow's History Hit - Why Do Empires Fall?

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

For centuries, the Roman Empire commanded unparalleled control over the world around it. It expanded its borders through trade and conquest, sucking resources from the periphery into its thriving centre - Rome. And then, suddenly, everything changed. The Empire entered a state of crisis and rapidly disintegrated. The West has experienced a similarly dramatic rise and fall over the last 3 centuries, moving from an era of global dominance to one of economic stagnation and political division. But is the decline and fall of empires inevitable? And what can be done to avoid the fate of Rome? In this episode, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley join Dan to compare the West's current crisis with that of Rome and discuss what comes next.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Shakespeare said, there is a tide in the affairs of man. And I think that's true, of course. I think it's particularly true when you look at the rise and fall of the great powers, how they've come and gone, the ebbs and the flows, like the tide, Assyria, Persia, Mali, the Inca, Mongol, British. Some of those hegemonic powers, those mighty empires have left a husk behind, an imprint. Others have left hardly any modern trace, no current incarnation in the UN General Assembly. And on this podcast day, we're going to think about that inevitable process, the rise and fall, but we're going to particularly think about, well, a couple of mighty powers, some comparing and contrasting. One mighty power which rose, came to dominate much of the known

world, experienced rapid economic growth, built sophisticated institutions, a dominant military, but then declined. Great power was concentrated in the hands of incompetent fools, was contested politics in its centre. On its peripheries, rivals copied, they adapted, they learned. The empire was hit by migration and disease, which gnawed away at its vitals. I'm talking obviously about the Roman Empire, but if you're hearing any echoes, well then you're not alone. Because this was a special podcast I recorded a couple of years ago, and it was with the chair of medieval history at King's College London, the legend that is Peter Heather, and the equally brilliant Cambridge political economist John Rapley. They'd just written a book called Why

Empires Fall, Rome, America, and the Future of the West. And they went there, they made that explicit comparison. They tried to find things that were interestingly similar about Rome and the USA and the West, and they looked for points of difference as well. It was a very stimulating book, it's as interesting, important now as ever, because of course we've seen the continued military challenge and political challenge of Russia, the growing strength of China, and other factors as well that have only made this discussion more pertinent. So we thought we'd give it another whirl, given the majority of people listening to this podcast were not listeners back in 2023. So welcome to all you newbies. What lessons are there from the past? What is similar?

What is different? I really hope this helps you think differently about our world. Enjoy. John and Peter, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's our pleasure. We're very happy to be here. I never get it with historians. Half the time we say we mustn't ever compare things. You know, the Roman Empire is an entity distinct in itself. We mustn't fall into the trap of Machiavelli and Charlemagne and the British and the Americans and comparing ourselves to the Romans. And then you guys are saying, no, no, this is exactly what we're going to do. It's important and useful. Can you just

give me the top line? Why should we embrace this kind of comparative history? I think we need to embrace it because it's difficult and challenging, but it actually helps you shed light on a topic that you won't get. If you just look at one example of a phenomenon by itself, a series of potential explanations will suggest themselves, and that's fine. But if you look at two or more examples of similar phenomena, then that will tend to highlight specific things that they have in common, and those commonalities might actually allow you to develop a broader understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. Might or might not. I mean, comparative history is experimental. It's difficult. It's full of possible dangers. You have to do it carefully,

and you have to do it with your eyes wide open, but that's the potential gain from it. In other words, I don't think there are precise rules of historical development, but that's the potential gain from it. In other words, I don't think there are precise rules of historical development, but I do think certain patterns repeat themselves. And it's only by going comparative that you can pick up the repetitive patterns. And if there is a pattern that repeats, then that is telling you something that's well worth understanding about human beings and the way they operate. If I can just add something quickly from the economic perspective, Dan, I remember years ago I worked in the field of development economics and somebody who was protesting the application of a particular economic theory

to his country's case study, and he said, our country is unique. And I said, well, if I punch you in the face, that will be a unique experience, but the person sitting next to you is probably not going to say, well, you'll have to punch me in the face for me to know what's going to likely come. I think when you look at these cases, which are all unique, and everyone is in its own right sui generis, but the question is, are there kind of currents that run through them all that we can tease out? And this is what Peter and I did find. We started with this comparison of an informal conversation years ago. He had just finished his book on the fall of the Roman Empire. I had just finished a book on globalisation, contemporary globalisation.

And we were struck at similar narratives that came out. We said we should explore this and see if there's something there. And that's what we try and do. And the resonances aren't the obvious ones that people reach to, for example, in the immigration debates. They're actually deep under the surface, but they're there. That's what's so tantalising about history, isn't it? Because if we were physicists, there would be observable, repeatable, testable rules, Peter, to use your word. That's not true with history, is it?

But there are patterns, and that's what always feels just slightly beyond our grasp to be certain about things. Although each of these things, as you say, are sui generis, why are patterns observable? Is it to do with us? Is it the humans? Is it to do with our physical environment, the rain, the rock, the food, the fish in the ocean? I think fundamentally what it's telling us about is human nature and the human species as it has evolved. As I understand it, Homo sapiens sapiens has been the same for the last 40,000 years. Obviously, we know things that our ancestors didn't know, but our fundamental drives are exactly the same. And in fact, if you don't people history with recognizable human beings, like the ones you see around you in the modern world, it seems to me your historical reconstruction is deeply flawed.

So I think what it's telling us about is human beings. I get on very well with most people. I have nothing against people individually. But I do say to my students, the third years, when they're thinking about history, if you've studied all this history at university, and you come away with the fundamental conclusion that human beings are nice, then I think you've probably missed the point. That is not what human history shows. Homo sapiens sapiens is communal, intelligent, cooperative, but also utterly ruthless. We are the most ruthless predator that evolution has ever thrown up. You can just see the way we dominate the planet. There's been no species that has the kind of combination of ruthlessness and intelligence that makes us so effective. I mean, I think these commonalities are telling us about

Homo sapiens sapiens as a species, fundamentally. Do you think that, John, as well? Yeah, I do. I think at the end of the day, you know, human history is made by humans. Yeah. And I think there will always be those differences. There are differences across time, across cultures, across physical context. But at the end of the day, you know, there are some fundamental drives. And so it would be surprising that we'd get totally different histories emerging from this same species. I think it really does stretch credulity. The challenge is not to overstate resonances and say, basically, history doesn't repeat itself,

but could be that the drivers of history do. Rome exercises such an extraordinary grip on our imaginations in the West, and I almost don't want to get into that kind of cultural history of our Rome obsession. But why today do you think that Rome and its empire, its rise and its fall is useful and important? And are we talking just about like US hard power or is there a sense of its importance in our kind of wider Western story? I think it's important to the wider Western story. It's almost using Rome to think with. I mean, that's the kind of phrase that's knocking around in academic historical circles a lot. You take something different and you use it to think about the thing that you're primarily interested in.

And I think the Roman case is particularly useful to think about because it's complete. You know, you were talking about a physics experiment. We can't set up a kind of empire experiment and watch it unfold and test our suggested patterns out against it, because that's not the way humanity works. No one would want us to do it, and we wouldn't be allowed to, and rightly so. But the Roman example has worked its way through to its conclusion, and you can see the entire course of Roman imperial history on the one hand. And the second reason that makes it particularly useful, I think, is that the image that we have of the Roman Empire is still deeply shaped by the kind of 18th century understandings of the way that empire went. And Gibbon is not the first to

talk about decline and fall, but he sure as hell puts the word decline in gold shining huge letters in everyone's brain. So the idea that an imperial structure has to decline, has to lose its essential durability before it will fall apart, that's the legacy. And actually the huge difference in my field from the way you have to think now compared to even as recently as 50 years ago, is that we know that the late empire is not a declined and feeble entity. We know that the empire is at the peak of its prosperity across the vast majority of its landscape in the fourth century, immediately prior to the its landscape in the fourth century immediately

prior to the unraveling in the fifth century before that everyone thinks that the imperial economy is stuffed the politics are falling apart and by the fourth century and fifth century collapse it just kind of you know few barbarians breathe on it and it falls over i'm always very struck by our obsession with the idea that decline will be followed by a fall. You lose peripheral territory and eventually a barbarian will be jumping up and down looting Hadrian's tomb, right? And actually the story, interestingly, of European empires more recently is European people in the imperial metropole, Swedes, the Belgians, the Brits, the French, have never been richer and never been more content

as their empires collapsed in incredibly dramatic fashion in some occasions. So what is declining and what is falling, I think, is sometimes kind of important. Yeah, I think that's a really important point, you know, because Peter and I make that argument, that in fact, the high watermark of Western imperialism, we argue, of greatest prosperity and of greatest power actually follows the end of formal imperialism. It is the decolonization. And then that's where we find the interesting parallels with the late Roman Empire is the move towards a sort of essentially confederal system where it's a unifying culture rather than a unifying political center that holds it together. unifying culture rather than a unifying political center that holds it together. Nevertheless, I think when we talk about decline, and there's one very big difference between the Roman Empire and the modern world that we've found, Peter and I, in that decline does happen,

it's inevitable, it's programmed into the life cycle of empires. The difference today is that it's relative decline. So that the Western world's share of global economic output is declining, will continue declining, and that has already begun to bring with it a necessary decline in its ability to dominate global affairs the way it became used to, that we can't make America great again. We certainly can't make Britain great in the way that a certain type of Brexiteer wanted to do, but it doesn't necessarily mean absolute decline and that's the big difference with rome that there's no reason to think it will lead to a fall and because there are fundamental differences between the present day and the past and we draw those out in the book but to avoid

that we have to sort of begin going in a different course and the worst thing that accelerate the decline and britain is actually a living example of this, is that the attempt to remake your greatness is the very thing that will accelerate its decline. The British economy and the British state in global affairs is in rapid decline because it is so determined to sort of recapture that past greatness. And it's making all the wrong choices. You talk a lot about economic exploitation. Are we right to think about empire in the sort of very basic sense and perhaps some of the computer games we play now? You invade Gaul and you extract economic value from that place in terms of raw materials, in terms of slaves, and you enrich the imperial centre. I mean, is that a model of imperial expansion? Does that work

for Chinese imperial expansion throughout its history? Does it work for European expansion from the 15th century onwards? Is that why we grow and how we grow? It's how we start to grow, I think. As a model for how and why empires begin, then I think it's spot on. You know, the Roman Empire starts as a conquest state, spot on. The Roman Empire starts as a conquest state, and they looted everything. The Roman victory triumphed. They carried everything they'd taken from Egypt, for instance, all the ancient treasures and whatever, showed them off in Rome. But it's not the full story. That's only the beginning. This is what's so interesting to me about the Roman Empire as we've now come to understand it, and as the new evidence for broader prosperity

across the empire has become clear, the point that it underlines, is that you create this conquest state, but then you kickstart actually two related processes of development. One within territories under your complete control that start to become part of an expanded imperial core. So by the late empire, Gaul is a center of imperial dominion. So 400 years after Caesar, the Emperor Constantine's court and his father's court has established a trier on the Rhine. Well, on the Moselle feeding into the Rhine. But, you know, that's the process of

development. And you've got Roman landowning provincial communities with more or less equal rights, right across the empire, everywhere from Hadrian's Wall to the Euphrates. So it starts as a conquest state run out of central southern Italy for central and southern Italian landowning elites, it evolves over time into a community of communities. So that's one process. I'm being very naughty here, Peter, and I'm thinking about you could have inserted California into that example. Absolutely. This is one of our commonalities. We think that the way that the spread of Western dominion worked over the imperial period from the 17th century onwards whenever you want 16th if you want to push it back a little further down to the modern days exactly like that so you know

canada where john partly comes from australia new zealand these are the goals of the fourth century they're part of the imperial core they've become part of the imperial core that's one process of development and that's more or less deliberate. The bit that's less deliberate is then the more dominated peripheral areas that are never brought in and given equal rights to the core, where you still set up a set of drivers which transform them. So the Indias, if you like, the Chinas, they're involved in some ways in this imperial system and i think to me the light bulb moment in doing this was thinking about empires not as things but as systems things with moving parts and a change in one part of the system will change other parts

so the system you've got a kind of center you've got an immediate periphery and then you've got a more distant periphery so places like gaul were in the inner periphery, they become part of the expanded core, but you're also changing the world around you in some very dramatic ways. Peter, you've written beautifully about that in other books. And I think cartographers are to blame for this, because we become so obsessed with maps and the bit that's red and the bit that's not red. And the British, certainly, the Chinese under the Ming, for example, and the American system, it's not about the bit that's red. It's about shipping lanes. It's about influence. It's about the peripheries, the peoples and the clients beyond there. Totally agree. John, I'd like to ask you,

I've become very interested, as we mentioned earlier in the conversation, and I've become interested because you see it in the present day as well. The idea of who's benefiting from this predatory period of empire, like the wealth of Gaul, which is flooding in to Rome. Is it the public purse that's paying for it, but private individuals that are becoming phenomenally wealthy as a result? Just as today, you see hugely rich kind of entrepreneurial plutocrats, and then when things go wrong, the rest of us are supposed to set up and bail out banks, for example, or deal with environmental spillage. Is that something that you see in other imperial systems?

Certainly you do. This is one of the things that Peter and I draw out in the book, is that the history of migration runs through the history of empires, all empires. And it is migrants who really bring about the imperial transformation. It's migrants who are engineering this exploitation initially. But in the process, there's something else which happens, which is that these migrants then inadvertently bring about the transformation of the periphery. So in the beginning, it is very much an extractive model, you know, money flows to the center. And we started the podcast talking about comparative history. And one of the podcast talking about comparative history.

And one of the things that Peter and I found is when we sort of reimpose or we juxtapose the two time periods, and we said, imagine if we were applying the sort of the Gibbon style model, which is still very popular with our historians and political scientists, this idea that we see Rome's decay. And Peter says, well, Rome did decay, but it didn't mean the empire decayed. If we'd applied that model to Rome or to the modern period, we would say, well, you know, capitalism was in decline 400 years ago, because look at southern Italy in the 20, you know, today, it's just not a rich place anymore. It's been decaying. But that's because the epicenter continually moves outward further

and further into these peripheries. And so what happens is that inadvertently with the transformation of the provinces and then the peripheries, they gradually become richer. And you mentioned California, that's the example we have is that you start out with a sort of purely extractive model, which then leads to this transformation where the province overtakes the core. And now we're saying we're moving into the period where the periphery itself is what is beginning to overtake, that the rise of economies like China, like India, and right across the developing world, we're seeing the most dynamic economies. And this is because they've benefited from that. The big difference between antiquity and today is that in the Roman Empire, it was primarily a military transformation that these new flows of wealth make possible. Today, we're saying it's fundamentally in trade relations and diplomacy. Developing countries are getting more and more power to sort of get benefits and to sort of manage the flow of global resources to their advantage. But does that mean they have any interest in overturning the empire? No, because unlike in the Roman Empire, which was a steady state economy, this is a growing economy. And they all, China to this day, China still depends on the American economy.

That's what's going to be different. There doesn't have to be the same kind of conflict and fall. There can be if we make the wrong choices. But it's not sort of programmed into the genetic code of this particular period. Yeah, I think that's the difference that is worth underlining. You know, in the ancient world, there is one source of wealth, which is the land and exploitation of the land. It's a fixed asset. You can't make more agriculturally productive land. It is what it is. So any struggle for power will focus on control of the land. And you will end up with necessarily,

therefore, conflict over controlling the best bits of agricultural territory. And you will end up with necessarily, therefore, conflict over controlling the best bits of agricultural territory. And that's why the end of the Roman Empire would be conflictual in the end, because you're going to come down to the struggle for control of the assets, which are fixed and very visible. And they're in one place, you can't move them. The modern world is very different. The body of assets increases as trade flows and new relationships expand world GDP, as it were, and you can end up changing power relations without having to seize control of physical bits of what used to be the imperial center. More empires rising and falling after this. Don't go away. Smacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. and we need to hope that president she doesn't desire derbyshire right that in a way we need to celebrate this because president she and his cronies can amass great wealth and power through these other more intangible assets classes that you've just referred to and don't need to take physically take california because

it's the physical taking of land as we know tragically from recent history let alone ancient history yes that is deeply traumatic because that is back to our kind of corporeal physical you know i need your house to billet my men in i need to destroy this to clear a field of fire. The physicality of taking that asset is so savage, isn't it? Absolutely it is. I mean, there have been serious attempts, as you know, to downgrade the amount of violence involved in the end of the Roman imperial system. And, you know, they have half a point. But in the end, actually, when you look at the narrative sources, there's a hell of a lot of violence in the 5th century. Why do all the villas in Roman Britain disappear? Well, the previous owners have been evicted, downgraded, turned into slaves, or whatever. This is not a cozy process, not at all.

In Vindolanda, I fought on behind Adrian's wall that they tear up the gravestones from the cemetery to plug up the gate to boot both. I mean, that feels pretty dystopian. Guys, let's talk a little about the decline. I look at the British Empire in the late 18th and 19th, and in a way, well, I mean, there's a series of gigantic battles previous to that with external, but in a way,

it feels like quite a good time. It's like humans jumping through the Holocene window. There are times when competitors fall away for whatever reasons. And then, for example, China, nothing is entirely isolated, of course. But, you know, the Mughal state in India has a crisis just as the Brits are coming in, for example. And they're related, but it's not entirely caused by the British. So sometimes states rise and fall. It's not just the kind of Thucydides thing, you know, another state next door got really powerful and kicked the front door in, right? What do you see happening at the moment? Well, it's interesting you mentioned Thucydides because, of course, there's this popular trope, the idea of a Thucydides trap, that inevitably there's going to be conflict

between the United States and China because a rising state always challenges a declining state. Of course, this is based on a misreading of Thucydides, but we also argue that there's going to be conflict between the United States and China because a rising state always challenges a declining state. Of course, this is based on a misreading of Thucydides, but we also argue that there's no particular reason to assume this in the present day. Much of the assertiveness we see in China has to be put into its context. As you mentioned, Dan, I mean, there's this extraordinary period in the 19th century of decline. China is one of the few cases in the world of an economy which doesn't just decline in relative terms in the modern period, but actually declines in absolute terms. It gets absolutely poor. Now, partly that's internal, as you mentioned, as was the case with Mughal Empire. It simply couldn't adapt to the arrival of European colonialism. And partly it is the exogenous shock of European colonialism and technology, which was able to dominate China,

and also the political mechanisms to organize that technology for military purposes. And so there is this sort of situation where one is feeding off the other, and there isn't that process in China, the way you begin to see in India, of a very slow transformation. So India's decline in the 19th century is a relative decline. But as we point to the histories of some of the families that emerged in the Indian colonial period in the Raj, some of the Indian families, you know, there is the growth of an economic base that will become politically powerful and ultimately feed into the nationalist movement in the 20th century and push this. China follows a slightly different route. But in the present day, now that China has sort of got back to where it was historically, it is beginning to occupy the same sort of military role it did. But an increasing militarization in the South China Sea, I'm not saying this isn't an issue.

But I remember a few years ago, a British defense secretary said, well, we have this new aircraft carrier. We're going to send it into the South China Sea to keep an eye on the Chinese. And my immediate thought was, how would he take it if Xi Jinping said, we have a new aircraft carrier. We're going to send it into the English Channel and keep an eye on the British. It's extraordinary the amount of presence we expect we're entitled to across the world. And it's going to be uncomfortable, but there is going to have to be some acceptance that in many neighborhoods, we're going to have to sometimes forego dominance in the Western powers, or we're going to have to negotiate it. It's going to be a tricky transition.

But the idea that we can simply maintain the status quo, that is where the danger of real conflict comes. I'm not saying you surrender to China and you let China take Taiwan. There's a whole thorny issue there. But certainly one of the lessons we learn from history is that when there is a rising peer competitor, very often the empires actually have a shared interest against another party that threatens them both. But when they go to war with each other, it's the other party that ends up winning. The sort of broad theme in the book, each other, it's the other party that ends up winning. The sort of broad theme in the book, or one of the broad themes in the book, is the way in which political relationships restructure themselves around economic realities over the sort of medium term. So you can make economic changes that don't have massive political impacts immediately. But if they are structural economic

changes in terms of patterns of economic power, then patterns of political power will follow those, and pretty promptly, in fact. And this is why once the tectonic plates of the world economy have shifted, and China is an unshiftable empire, you can't go back to a world of American-led Western world dominion. It won't happen. It cannot happen. And as John says, if you try and do that, if you try and reassert the old world in the new conditions, that's exactly when you will get conflict. And the outcomes are often nasty. So the sort of Rome-Persia relationship goes massively out of balance in the late 6th and early 7th centuries. They destroy each other. And this is what creates the power vacuum into which Muhammad's new religion can explode as a uniting force to create the whole Islamic world. The superpower conflict, when neither side can win, is a crazy option and is the one to stay away from. That's right. It's the Germans and the Arabs. I mean, who saw those two bands come here? I mean,

they're the ones who benefit from this insane super coffee. But it is interesting, just coming back to this point, like, well, first of all, there's so many points you've raised, one of which it strikes me that what you can do is you can try and expand that definition of westernness, hence the beauty contest going on in India at the moment, and the interest in what Lula's up to in Brazil. But Japan is a huge part of this story, South Korea is a huge part of this story. If you're worried about a new form of Chinese global dominion, there's things you can do as an American to try and, in possibly similar ways to which British statespeople in the early 20th century tried to bring America into kind of uneasy and unenduring alignment with kind of British imperial interests. But But you know,

you guys finished on that, right? It's welcoming people in and but that involves in itself, compromise with South American cultures that might be different. Yeah, no, absolutely. John has spent his life working in the developing world. And the word I most associate with John is the need for the West to show a bit more humility. I think he said the word humility to me more than just about any other at least repeatable word on radio. It's what the West still lacks. It is as recent as 2000 that the West is consuming 80% of world GDP. I mean, that is just mind bending, the scale of dominion that that represents. After 2008, it dropped pretty quickly. And it's then going down slowly since. But that level of

European and North American dominance of the world creates a kind of cultural arrogance that is a problem. But at the same time, we both think the West kind of found its way to some cultural and political forms that really are pretty good. Free presses, rule of law, these make a huge difference to the quality of life. I've taught many students from bits of the former Soviet Union, and they come to Britain, they come to London, and they notice that actually people are relaxed because you can't just be screwed over by someone who knows someone in the system and therefore can get you what you want instantly. Obviously, wealth and power still exist in the West. Some people are richer and more

powerful, but there are some serious balances and checks in place on the kind of instantaneous linkage between immediate wealth and being able to do what you want that do make for a superior overall experience for most people. And there are various parts of the ex-colonial world now becoming its own world that share some of those important values. And both of us, I think, feel that actually with a great deal more humility, these could be very active and important members in an expanded Western with a small W, I suppose, or alliance. Yeah, I completely agree. And therefore, what I'm going to say next might sound like it's disagreeing with that, but I don't mean it to. And we look at American experience in trying to seize territory, invade and occupy,

albeit for apparently sort of progressive aims. And you look at Russia's experience in Ukraine at the moment. This point about land, is this the oldest form of dominion, the oldest form of settlement and conquest? Is that the thing to avoid at all costs? It's not great that the Chinese Communist Party have bought all of the Sri Lankan infrastructure in the last 10 years, right? But it's a lot better than them having actually invaded Sri Lanka. Is that the kind of world that we just somehow need to get cool with? I do think that. I'm certainly not an apologist for the Beijing regime because I would not want to live in China, put it that way,

or I wouldn't want to live in China for anything more than a short period of time. Nevertheless, I think if you look at Chinese behaviour in the world, so much of what is seen as being underhanded is actually in many ways is quite, I don't want to say enlightened, but it's not belligerent. I mean, for example, it gets a lot of criticism, the Chinese government, for providing aid money, you know, they can be the most dictatorial regimes, but there's a legitimate Chinese tradition of non-interference where they say, well, it's not for us to say which regimes we'll do business with. We're not there to actually impose a Chinese model. We're not there to penetrate the society and take it over. You know, I mentioned Sri Lanka, and part of the problem that China is now encountering,

it's beginning to have the experience of an imperial power, because even though it's not occupying land, it does occupy assets, and some of these are debt-funded assets, and the projects haven't worked out, and the governments that have borrowed the money from China are now saying, well, hang on, you know, we can't repay this, can we reach an agreement? And China is starting to, for the first time, really encounter what it means to be an imperial power. And that's going to be uncomfortable for China. So my own view is let them get on with the process, let them make that adjustment. It's not an easy thing to be an imperial power. I think in the grand history, I will say that if we take the Iraq war out of the picture, which was, I think, a disastrous invasion from

which America may never fully recover and the West may never fully recover, I think you'd have to say that American imperialism was perhaps among the most enlightened. And even if you go back into European imperialism, I mean, if you look down at the history of nationalism in the former colonies, very often these are Europhiles or Anglophiles who feel hard done by that they like the values of the British Empire, but they don't feel they're getting their fair share. And that's what turns them towards independence

that will never be treated as equals within the empire. And we have to remember to this day, I mean, this is not that long ago. I mean, Britain just a few years ago elected a prime minister who said that the biggest mistake Africa made was to get rid of Britain. It was much better when Britain ran it. You know, that kind of thing really rankles with Africans who are struggling with a lot of challenges, some of which are a legacy of colonialism, simply to be dismissed as you're inferior to us. And I think that's an example of, you know, when Peter talks about humility, we have to accept that, in fact, you know, some of the best research institutions, some of the best businesses are not coming from the Western world. They're coming from these developing countries. And culturally, a lot of the dynamism is there. And rather than try and sort of say, well, that's a threat to our identity, we should be embracing that as being a flourishing of a shared value system, that kind of freedom of thought, of speech,

of artistic creativity that came and took root. Just two sentences. As John has pointed out, this is why, although the sort of Western alliance in support of Ukraine kind of points to the way the West might operate in the world going forward, it's got big holes in it, because actually, in all the UN votes, most of Africa has abstained. And that is because Russia was the only place that gave them any support in the decolonization process. And that is the legacy of Western colonialism that the West is going to have to get past by showing more humility in order to achieve a reformed larger bloc with which to then deal on equal terms with China. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're charting the rise and fall of empires. More coming up.

More coming up. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Let me just ask you at the end, let's be really naughty and ask historians and political scientists about the future, which we should never do. When you look out the next 200 years, if we make it, and first of all, we know the technology is going to keep changing, possibly exponentially. But do you think the language of decline, of empire, of rising and falling, and possibly even of physically taking territory for your neighbour, as we've tragically seen the attempt made in Ukraine today, is that a pattern that's going to endure, do you think? Or are we reaching some post-Fukuyama brave new era where history ceases to matter as much as it

once did? I think some of the basic parameters are changing and they're changing under our feet. And I'm not so sure what the changes in those parameters will do. But the big one, I think, is demographics. The most surprising fact that we uncovered in the course of thinking about the book was the realization that the demographic transition in Europe with all the children surviving and then a kind of two-generation gap before people realized that all their children were surviving and had smaller families meant that in the late 19th century, Europeans are breeding like rabbits and spreading entirely over the globe. So, about 25% of the whole global population around 1900 is of European

descent, whereas it should be more like 15, 16%. That's been the kind of historical average, and that's where it's gone back to. That's an extraordinary fact, but it's pointing then at some serious structural underpinnings in the way that they're being transformed now. So, the fundamental point now is that Western populations are simply not reproducing themselves. It's only Iceland and Israel in the developed world where each woman is on average having the 2.1 children that they need in order for populations to stay stable. So we've got aging populations, we've got declining populations from native stock. And the whole discussion about world power and about immigration is simply not taking account

of this. There will not be enough people in the workforce without immigration for Western societies to look after their old people and to maintain their levels of output and production and wealth generation. That is simply a fact. And that is already a fact. that is already a fact and it's going to become ever more pressing a fact and i just don't see any willingness in political discourses in the west properly to acknowledge the significance of this fact except perhaps in canada which does take stock of this and react appropriately the problem in the future is not going to be keeping migrants out it's going to be finding migrants i've seen one thing that reckons within 20 years, we will be competing for the remaining population flows,

because the demographic transition is happening in Africa as well. It's a little bit slower, but it's going to happen. There will not be these bodies of surplus population from elsewhere that you can pull in to shore up your own economy and your own labor forces. So that parameter is just shifting in such a fundamental way. Are we going to react sensibly to that? Will that actually take the force out of your question about seizing land? Actually, we don't need land. We need people. That's what we need. Where are we going to find them? The robots, Peter. The robots are going to be putting me to bed at night when I'm in my dotage. The Japanese experimented with that and actually they didn't like it it wasn't a funny experience so japan has finally relaxed its immigration laws because they realized that actually

their beloved grandparents don't like being put to bed by robots but anyway we'll see john last word from you do you expect someone in your position in 200 years time still to be able to look back on these historical narratives and examples and them to have real usefulness in their world? do even worse and say, let's look forward 2,000 years. I will say with some confidence. We started this discussion saying, why does the Roman Empire loom so large? Well, there's a very simple reason it looms large. It's because the languages we speak, the legal systems we use, our models of higher education, our dramatic artistic traditions, our musical legacy, so much of that in Western society began with the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire disappeared a long time ago, but those languages and much of the culture, I grew up a Catholic, Dan, and you go to church and the priest is wearing what was essentially the vestments of

the late Roman nobility. I mean, they've just continued on that way. And they do it around the world. They do it here in Africa. So as Peter said, there was this period of time where Westerners, Europeans in particular, went throughout the world. They're still there here in South Africa. 400, 500 years ago, there were no white people in South Africa. There are lots of white people in here. There are lots of white people in Zimbabwe. And you get the cultural assimilation on a very large scale. That will endure. I'm confident saying that linguistically, in terms of our trade policy, trade laws, and so much of the international legal regimen, that will endure. And what will help it to endure is if we don't try and, as Peter said, we don't say, well, we've got to

fight a rearguard action. I think conflict over land is going to continue to be less important other than irredentist movements like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, simply because you don't need to control land to control assets. In fact, controlling land, and this is one of the things that decolonization showed, controlling land is actually administratively, it's a pain in the neck, and it's a resource drain. But I think on the other hand, internal conflict is the thing we have to worry about. These societies which are struggling to adapt to migrants, and we're seeing those sorts of tensions which are being exploited by a certain type of politician, that's the kind of things I think we have to look out to that lead to cultural clashes, that lead to the kind of violence we've been beginning to see over the last couple of

generations. I think that will be the challenge, and managing that is going to be the great challenge of the future. But if anything, I would say look to colonial societies, which did adapt to having white Europeans living in their midst and speaking their language and adopting many of their legal codes, and assimilating them and sometimes adapting them. I mean, I think we have a lot to learn from the history of colonized peoples as to how you manage this difficult transition. You know what? That's great, guys. We haven't even talked about the potentially catastrophic results of climate breakdown as well. But anyway, guys, we've got to stop it there. I could talk to you all day. Thank you so much, Pete Heather and John Rapley. What is your book called? We keep getting it wrong. It's called Why Empires Fall, Rome, America and the Future of the West. We are talking about the future, Dan. We're very ambitious. All historians talk about the future.

Yeah, it took us about 18 years to write it. So it's had lots of different titles, which is why I sometimes get confused. But yeah. Save the hardest question till last. Okay, guys, thank you very much for coming on. Been a pleasure. Thank you for having us.

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